We blokes have been waiting patiently for the tide to turn. OK, so in recent years the movies have felt obliged to puff up women as wise, caring and passionate goddesses, as dauntless amazons and as all-round superpeople. M has been transgendered, and even Bond seems destined eventually to have the op. Such male heroes as still turn up on-screen often emanate ironic absurdity. Other hombres tend to be mindless brutes or witless ninnies.

Still, the girls obviously deserved their turn, after all those Clints, Marlons, Charltons, Kirks, Burts and Warrens had hogged the celluloid for so long. We chaps assumed that gynocratic ascendancy marked a necessary phase through which the movies would have to pass, in recognition of unarguable social change. Sooner or later, we supposed, men would be restored to at least something like parity of esteem.

Then, along comes Mamma Mia!. Forcefully but effortlessly, this film delivers what seems ominously like a final verdict on gender roles in the latter-day western world. Guys, go see it and get real. Our day is done.

At first, you might think the forgotten function of modern menfolk is about to be rediscovered. After all, the proceedings are triggered by a single-parented teenage girl's obsession with finding her dad. However, ye sturdy warriors of Families Need Fathers, prepare to weep. We swiftly learn that she's deluded. It matters not a whit which of three possible candidates contributed half of her genetic code. A mother's love turns out to be a sine qua non. A dad's role, it's suggested, is simply to pay the bill at his daughter's wedding. In this instance, the trio are denied even that privilege. Their putative daughter wants to get married so that her own children will have a father around. Wrong thinking once more. Nuptials off.

The maid's plucky, determined, tireless mum hasn't just raised a ravishing child alone. She's simultaneously built (literally as well as figuratively) a successful business out of nothing. Meanwhile, the men who may have fathered her child have been eking out existences of boring futility, drifting on the margins of life's pageant. It takes the maiden's summons to lure them towards the arena of meaningful action.

Turned away by the matriarch, they float offshore in a boat (literally as well as figuratively), while the womenfolk determine whether or not to reel them in. They exist not as agents in life's business, but simply as constructs of female desire, just as women were once so woefully represented by the film-makers of old. When eventually permitted a walk-on role in the drama, they dance (literally as well as figuratively) to muliebral music, clumsily and sheepishly.

Oh yes, that music. Abba's masterworks provide an ironised counterpoint from the as yet unfeminised 1970s to all these womanish goings-on. Barely had the very much boys-in-charge foursome split in 1982, before the witch-queen Catherine Johnson spotted that their oeuvre could be subverted for her own gynecic purposes. Her weird but brilliant scheme to mate it with the unlikely plot of a forgotten comedy starring Gina Lollobrigida gave us the stage musical that's now wowed over 30 million people. Hollywood's gloss has supercharged its message.

Souped up, camped up and karaoked by the stars, Benny and Björn's timeless ditties are suborned to infuse Mamma's fantasy island with giggling, girly gaiety. Here, life has been stripped of competition, predation, violence, intellect, argument and wit. It's become a perpetual hen-party, dominated by the middle-aged trouts whom men so notoriously ignore. Males participate strictly by female invitation, and then only on broken-balled terms. Even Mr Darcy is gay. Sex and the City, eat your heart out. She's Gotta Have It? Timid.

So, fellas, it's all pretty awful, eh? Certainly the film's stuck in the craw of some of the gents who've been to see it, especially the more mature of them. Nonetheless, I have to report that the male third of the audience of which I formed part seemed to find the whole thing wonderful. And so, as it happened, did I.

We'd glimpsed a woman's world fuelled by joy rather than resentment. The fact is that it rocked. I wouldn't want to live there all the time, but maybe we're all going to have to. We could do worse.